The founder of the local DM Supergroup, also founder of Swan and Raven Studio, a pal, set this up as a fund-raiser for legal aid in Virginia. Folk getting snatched off the streets and disappeared is some bullshit. I have been detained by unaccountable national security forces on a fair few occasions so I am perfectly happy to support someone who shines a light and fishes for people who get vanished in the hope that noone cares enough to see due process done.
The zine itself - Hello/Goodbye is 'An Ekphrastic Collage Tabletop Roleplaying Anthology Zine' - and to answer the immediate question I have gotten by folk I have shown it to - "Ekphrasis is a Greek term meaning "description", and ekphrastic writing is a vivid, creative, written description and response to a work of visual art" to quote the introduction.
This zine is an interesting beast because it has a different 'recruiting angle' that what I typically see out there - the closest I guess would be an itch.io charity jam aligned to disaster relief or the like where you get a grab bag of absolutely all sorts. Typically when things get bound within covers there is a tighter systems restriction - all old school D&D or Mork Borg or Troika! or what have you. The common thread here are the art pieces provided by the organiser and that personal connection - which gives a much broader range of contributions within than you might otherwise typically find.
descriptor, artist
First impression - hot pink and yellow makes it stand out on your shelf! The art within is mostly collage work by the author and as per the concept of the zine, the various articles are responses to or inspired by those pieces.
So what is all this stuff you get in this zine?
METALEPTIC TRANSGRESSION V0.1 - a surreal RPG mini-system - definitely requires time to process this one. First of the avant-garde systems, I would recommend skip this to start, read the rest and come back to it; it makes more sense after you have read everything else first.
Don't Hurt Me - game about relationships, mental health and navigating the lives of people stuck together - this feels like the quick-start for a system; a larger format would permit more examples to illustrate play since this one did not immediately invoke an existing playstyle so I was not sure how the parts meshed together. There is an interesting social push-pull play portrayed here that could be a game in itself or a mini-system brought to high-stakes social and political situations in other games.
Candidus Coloris - a special Experimental Rule for GMs with emotion-tied colour-auras and bonii to actions in harmony with that colour. Could be an interesting rule to make tangible the strangeness of a fey realm or other world.
These Blooming Delights - dungeon for Mork Borg - 10 rooms of what appears to be a druids sanctum, lots of connections between the rooms, pithy descriptions, a half-dozen monsters/NPCs - essentially a one-page dungeon layout. Good stuff - though the Mork Borg house style of loud art may not be to all tastes. For a back-stage look see the authors blog - Crow’s Corner - in Writing "These Blooming Delights".
Panepainters - a GM-less game about memory, grief and summing up - reminiscent of 'For the Queen', repurposes the cards of a tarot deck in a collective memorial ritual.
Intermezzo - verse to go with the picture - a break on your read-through.
Below Wind And Wave, She Flies - a setting - the immortal wood of the elves now hidden beneath a lake - comes with a half-dozen tables of encounters, sights and clues and another page of half a dozen NPCs.
Venemura, the Haunted Kingdom - another setting - with some popular spots and encounters, a local race, god and some thoughts on questing - enough to fire inspiration and support a session or twos play in this place.
Caeldim – The Aberration - a fey NPC to drop into your games, pretty plug and play, good potential here.
Lady Basalt of the Blazing World and Her Glass Hat of Moon Mirrors - described as a linked series of forest encounters, OSR-style - I would more call this a tower and its surrounds, with some three major NPCs some odd hazards that could range from delaying to crippling. A nice little site, good for dropping into any exisitng foresty adventure.
Breathweavers - an organisation extracted from the writers half-designed world - an interesting angle of entities out-with the rules of magic of the gameworld and the guards and entourage that accompany them. This one is either going to have you go 'ah-ha, I have an idea' where you can fluently rope in some other magic system or it might feel like a lot of homework. A potential wildcard if you feel things have gotten stale.
Wrap up - all in all what you get here is a bric-a-brac of things - systems, settings and mechanics for your table - not all necessarily immediately useful or appealing but likely. Some of the more complex entries are at the front - METALEPTIC TRANSGRESSION V0.1 and Don't Hurt Me both being unusual systems - I found I had an easier time of it reading through it back to front, starting with things that were more 'drop in', easily deployable for whatever system you might be running.
At time of writing the zine was headlining the HELLO//GOODBYE Charity Bundle for Legal Aid.
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